What is happening in the process of engaging architectural students and teachers for Including virtual and interactive systems in the projects developments?

Abstract

The new technologies applied to complex learning environments need a pedagogical design adapted to the competences that we want to enforce or improve, the adaptation of the teacher, new and actualized resources, and the capacity to make the learning following both, the face-to-face as the on-line mode. Our paper presents the perception of students and teachers, how by using the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach and using a gamified and interactive Virtual Reality (VR) system in the context of Building, Urban and Architecture studies we can re-force the acquisition of visual management competences. To improve the spatial competences and the visual understanding of 3D complex models for re-organizing the urban space, we have designed an educational proposal based on free applications where the students must design, create and integrate ephemeral architecture proposals for a citizenship final urban interaction. This step incorporates to the student’s assessment an informal feedback, which complements the formal evaluation and gives them a point of view based on valuable social data for further projects. However, the lack of standards, the complexity of the software, the learning times, and the teacher’s rejection to use these approaches, many times due to lack of interest or because of the digital gap derived from age and the classical workflows, are factors that are complicating the modernization of the learning process, establishing a low level of implantation and student’s use in other subjects, as our study demonstrates. For these reasons, we have conducted an explorative research to compare the perception of the students and the teachers, with the clear result, that shows that nowadays in Architecture education, we can find a gender, and age gap in the acceptation of these systems, something that blocks their training, while in the professional sector are used and demanded.